Being Meaghan
by Jenwryn
Summary: Companion oneshot to "Elizabeth's Email". What would it be like to arrive in Atlantis and screw everything up, eh? OFC Meaghan, McKay, Zelenka, Teyla. Part of my MegAU. Edited July 2008.


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_A/N: No, I don't own anything in the Stargate Atlantis. Meaghan Monahan is mine, however. She started out life as a mere plot device in Elizabeth's Email_, _but kind of took my fancy. Actually, Meaghan is the perfect example of what happens when you go on exchange overseas and take lectures in a foreign language... yup, you sit and scribble story instead. Sigh. Such a strain… _

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**Being Meaghan**

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Meaghan Monahan crept into the mess-hall, poured herself a cup of strong, plain black tea, and tried to slink to a corner table without anyone noticing her. She didn't seem to be very good at slinking, however, and supposed that she just hadn't had enough practice at it yet. Still, if her life kept going the way it had been lately, she figured she would soon improve.

Staring into the depths of her tea for a moment – it really wasn't very nice – she sighed before drinking down a large gulp of it. At the table nearest to where she sat, a group of military types (officers, she thought, guessing from how they held themselves rather than anything else, seeing as how she wasn't that good on the uniforms yet) talked loudly amongst themselves, and grinned in her direction. She knew they were gossiping about her. She didn't blame them._ She_ would gossip about her too, except that she _was _her… God, now she was starting to confuse herself. Meaghan grimaced, then took another swill of the brew they called tea around here. It was obvious that there weren't enough people from the British Commonwealth in Atlantis and that, apparently, anyone who had any clout at all preferred to drink coffee. She glanced at the tea again. Maybe she would have to take up the habit herself – coffee, you know. That was, if she lasted long enough to bother about it. Maybe coffee would be just the right thing to put her stupid brain into gear and obviously, all things considered, anything that would pull off _that_ job would be worth trying. Plus the tea was bloody dismal.

A little shy of twenty-eight years old, Meaghan Monahan had come to almost immediately from her second PhD graduation ceremony to her position as linguist-cum-palaeoanthropologist in the City of the Ancients. It was barely a few months earlier that she had been reading the ridiculous description of herself in the local newspaper of the small town where she had spent her childhood. _"A diminutive woman with a shock of red curls, dark eyes and an active spirit, Doctor Monahan, granddaughter of local mayor, Ralph Monahan, departs tomorrow for the United States..." _Humph. It sounded lovely enough on paper, but what it actually meant was that a short, slightly plump girl with impossibly irritating hair the colour of mandarins and skin that looked like she had lived out her days in the corner of a very deep well, would be leaving for the other side of the galaxy to try and finally be someone _other _than Ralph-bloody-Monahan's granddaughter. Her mother, who didn't have security clearance and believed that her daughter was somewhere vaguely off the coast of South America, had sent her the clipping because she thought it might amuse her. It had. Meaghan was normally easily amused. Just not today.

The whispering, glancing officers were starting to really rub her the wrong way. She glared at them and then almost spilt the dregs of her tea into her lap, which would, all things considered, have rather have spoilt the effect she was aiming for with her glare. As it was, the curse that burst from her as she knocked the cup with her arm, and then fought to keep it upright, just made them grin even more broadly. She fumed. It was like the kangaroo jokes. God in heaven, she was sick of kangaroo jokes already! You'd think that being in a different galaxy would open peoples' minds, but obviously not.

The girl swilled down the rest of her tea, then stalked over and dumped the cup unceremoniously in the tub for dirty dishes and frowned at the woman behind the serving counter who had done nothing more offensive than smile at her pleasantly. Meaghan didn't want people smiling at her any more than she wanted them whispering about her. Actually, come to think of it, she didn't want anything to do with people at all. The problem was, on a city isolated in the middle of a vast expanse of water, that she didn't have much say in the matter. And the last thing anyone was going to do would be to give her a lift over to the mainland in a puddlejumper. She could just imagine the looks on their faces if she even so much as dared go within a five-metre _radius _of a jumper...

Giving up on slinking, since she was obviously so pathetic at it, Meaghan stomped loudly down the halls until she found a balcony that no-one was using. Walking out onto it, she scowled as the door slid meekly shut behind her. If she had any complaint with the city – other than the slightly odd bathing arrangements – it was that you couldn't slam the doors. She _liked _slamming doors! Was that so very wrong? It was therapeutic. How were you supposed to express your rage and anger if you couldn't slam a door?

Meaghan had only been in Atlantis for three weeks, but it felt like a good three years. Oh, it was the dream job, there was no denying that. Who wouldn't want to travel across the universe – the _universe_ dammit! – and have the opportunity to explore unknown planets – well, planets unknown to people from Earth anyway. In fact, it was so very much up her alley that at first she had taken the whole thing as a joke. Like, seriously... Meaghan had been at university for the vast majority of the previous nine years of her life and in all that time had managed to keep her extracurricular passions mostly to herself; her fascination with so-called 'alternate' archaeology, and her interest in conspiracy theories and unexplained events, would not have sat well with her lecturers, or even the vast majority of her peers. Hell, she'd even met one professor who had actually created an entire website to showcase what he called 'crackpot ideas' and it was common knowledge that anyone caught dabbling with anything like them would get poor marks from him, no matter how good their work was, or the fact that such bias was strictly against uni regs. And so Meaghan had kept quiet, at least on-campus. Thus, when the phone call came, some months before her graduation, she had supposed that one of her friends had traced her favourite online user-name to some of the more 'out-there' websites that she frequented, and she had presumed that she was having her leg pulled.

She had been annoyed.

But not as annoyed as the man on the telephone had been.

Meaghan had gone to the interview still doubtful. And when the non-disclosure agreement had come out, she'd laughed, but signed it anyway, still waiting for the hidden cameras to pop out at any moment. Actually, it was a wonder, considering her attitude, that they'd ended up giving her the job at all.

And now here she was, leaning over a balcony in the lost city of Atlantis – _Atlantis!_ Right up there as one of the biggest stories ever labelled 'alternate' archaeology! If her lecturers could see here now... Not that she had been that surprised in the end. Seriously, for how many years had all the professionals said that everything Homer had written was a myth? And then along trotted Heinrich Schliemann and dug up not just Troy, but as Mycenae as well! Not, admittedly, that he was the best kind of archaeologist to mould yourself on, considering some of his methods, but...

Meaghan grinned, and relaxed a little, and decided that the wind in her hair felt good despite the fact that she knew it was turning her into a scarecrow. Yes, it had been the most enjoyable job interview she'd ever been to, since she had taken it all so lightly. Although it had verged on creepy by the end there, seeing as how they'd known everything about her, from the Norse runes tattooed down her spine, to the three-week holiday she'd spent in New Zealand when everyone else had thought she was at a summer school. Hell, they knew things even her own parents didn't know, like the joyride with her cousin Leah in their uncle's car. Meaghan smiled – well, she sure hoped her parents didn't know about that, although, if they did it would explain the docking her pocket money had experienced a few weeks later. Perhaps times hadn't been tough after all…

She kept smiling. Yes, they had known everything and it had only taken a few examples of their omniscience before she sobered up and realised that they were seriously who they said they were. Not that they had told her much, admittedly, at least not straight away. Just that the job was unusual, and in a distant location, and had a brilliant health scheme. But it wasn't as though she had had anything else lined up – do you know how many jobs there are on the offer out there for someone with doctorates in linguistics and palaeoanthropology? Sure, it all looked good on a CV. _Speaks six languages. Spent a year backpacking around Europe after high school. Worked four months up in Cape York Peninsula, three months on Flores. _But in practice... So of course she'd taken the job. And then when she got the finer details...! That was when she had started cramming Ancient for all it was worth, faster than she'd ever learnt anything in her life.

It still made her head spin. The extraordinary days on the _Daedalus _reading mission reports and analytic articles written by the woman she was replacing had been exciting enough. But then to actually set foot in the city!

Of course, within a week she had screwed everything up. Trying to be funny, she had managed to transport Doctor McKay, Colonel Sheppard and then – like that hadn't been enough – Doctor Weir, the leader of the whole shebang, into some other world thingy. Meaghan had been so sure they would send her home after that, that she had fled to her room the moment Doctor Weir had vanished. The minute she realised what she'd done she'd just kind of left, and had actually started shoving stuff into bags, that was how sure she'd been that they were going to kick her out. In the end, mortifyingly, she'd ended up on the floor of her room in a bawling wet mess of snot and tears.

That was where Teyla had found her. Meaghan liked Teyla – although it wasn't _right_ that anyone should have a figure like that while her own tummy curved over the top of her slacks – and she found it hard to remember that the woman had been born in a different galaxy. Actually, to be dead honest, Meaghan was still having a little trouble getting her head wrapped around the whole chronology of the Ancients. As a student of palaeoanthropology, human evolution was her baby, her forte, but still, even with her love for the weird, it was a little mind-bending. _Where_ did we come from again?

Still, back to Teyla – Teyla had found her in a blubbering heap and patted her kindly on the back and said in that nice voice you reserve for children and scared-screw-ups, 'I have been many, _many_ months among your people and have not yet seen anyone sent home for having made a mistake. I am sure that if you calm down and come and help Doctor Zelenka work on the device which was used, everyone will soon forget what happened.'

And the bizarre thing was, they actually had. Meaghan had managed to help Zelenka, and then everyone had been too busy making jokes about the Colonel and Doctor Weir to bother with the little Aussie… Meaghan paused in her train of thought and watched as one of the small sea birds which nested amongst the city's towers darted past her, and then shook her head. A mere three weeks here and she already knew as well as everyone else that that pair fancied each other – the Colonel and Doctor Weir. Of course, they still denied it, despite what had happened with the Almost Kiss, as it was known, and despite the persistent rumours about nocturnal to-ing and fro-ing between their rooms. Meaghan shrugged. She thought they made a cute couple, but if they wanted to play hush-hush then that was their business. Still, she was rather under the impression that if the Colonel were _hers_, she'd stake her claim loud and clear!

And so it had all blown over like nothing more than an unpleasant bump in the road. Oh, of course it would be on her files somewhere, no doubt in the same place as the description of her various tats and the illicit joy ride, but Meaghan had put on a brave face and gone about her work. Unfortunately, that had meant returning to the lab and helping Doctor McKay as he continued to try and decipher the device that she had caused so much trouble with, and the other one, that he had managed to bring back from the 'Ancient Area 51' (as Colonel Sheppard had dubbed it). Meaghan had been surprised that Doctor McKay had asked her back but, within about two seconds, he had disabused her of that belief by first explaining in no uncertain terms what he thought of her and the trouble she had caused, and then by making it crystal clear that if all the other linguists hadn't already been occupied she would never have set foot in the same lab as him again, let alone worked with him personally. It didn't matter that her actions had led to the discovery of an enormous cache of Ancient tech. Perhaps, if they had actually been able to use it... but they couldn't. And he was cranky.

That she could almost have dealt with – her pride was relatively flexible – if it hadn't have been for McKay himself. Oh, she understood the important role that he played in Atlantis: it hadn't taken more than a few days to work out that he, Sheppard and Weir, were the fundamental pillars of the entire expedition. But while Doctor Weir treated Meaghan with the same respect that she treated every member of her team, and while the Colonel winked at her with a little-boy grin _a là_ Han Solo and made her go all gooey inside, Doctor McKay just annoyed her. She couldn't even say what it was. She admired his resolve, envied his massive intellect, and respected his self-confidence. Hell, the guy wasn't even unpleasant to look at when he wasn't yelling at people. He just rubbed her up the wrong way. There was no real reason. Meaghan didn't need a real reason – to be honest, her world wasn't that bogged down in rationalism for her to need a reason for things like that.

To make matters worse, she simply concentrate on things very effectively with him constantly nagging at her like they'd be married for fifty years and he was the old woman. And so, on her first day back at his side she had spilt his coffee on him. Not on purpose – ye gods and little fishes, not on purpose! But she had thought that that was bound to be the end of their not-working working relationship. So had Doctor McKay. He had petitioned to Doctor Weir for a linguist swap with someone else, but Weir had just looked at him, raised her eyebrows, half-smiled at Meaghan, and said that _the two Doctors would just have to learn to play nicely together_. Meaghan didn't know which of them had been crankier at _that _response.

Then there had been the incident with the laptop. For the love of all that was good and holy, Meaghan was the first one to admit that she was a bit of techno-twit. It wasn't that she disliked technology; she was no Luddite. She loved the internet. She loved her digital camera. She _worshipped_ her MP3-player. But she just didn't know much about the finer details of things. Java was a place in Indonesia so far as she was concerned, and _lol _could mean 'lots of luck' or 'loads of lorries' or 'lungs of Lucifer' for all she knew. She used technology – just in her own unique way. So when McKay had asked her to do something on his own personal laptop, she had suggested tentatively that he might be better off doing it himself. He'd gotten sour and told her to act her age… and then exploded when she managed to irreversibly delete some important files. Damn it, she hadn't even known that was possible – seriously, wasn't that what the little rubbish bin down the bottom of the screen was for? To get things back out of?

That was the point when people had started recognising her in the hall. Meaghan thought it was partly amusement, but also partly relief that McKay had begun to vent all his spleen at her rather than at everyone else in the city. There were jokes about it circulating on the internal email system. But it wasn't until she had managed to break his favourite hand-held gadget, and he had _demanded _a swap with Zelenka's linguist (and had got it then, since he'd threatened he would strike if he didn't), that bets had begun to be taken on what Meaghan's next screw-up would be. In a way, she was insulted, but she was also relieved to be working with Doctor Zelenka instead of McKay. She quite liked Zelenka. The way McKay habitually treated him (though she _knew _it was good-natured in their case… perhaps) was just another reason that the Canadian irritated her. There was something incredibly soothing about the Czech and she rather thought that if she were allowed to give him a bit of a haircut... Meaghan blinked, and rubbed the tips of her fingers into her eye sockets. Of course, Zelenka was also almost old enough to be her father – well, not really, but still. He was a colleague, too. Then she smiled a small, wicked smile. She hadn't let a little inconvenience like that stop her in the past. There was that lecturer on _The Evolution of Human Sexuality _–that had been a most educative course, all things considered... And the dig leader that summer as an undergrad...

Still. None of the chaos she had caused was equal to the stunt she had pulled today. Heavens above, but when McKay found out… Zelenka had just sworn under his breath (Czech wasn't one of her languages, but you didn't need a dictionary to figure the translation) and looked at her with slightly despairing eyes. But McKay –McKay would tear strips from her, skin her alive, and hang her head-down in the gateroom as an example to all other humanities graduates foolish enough to put an erring foot into his domain.

_She had managed to de-program a jumper. _

Meaghan's strand of the ATA gene was a strong as the likes of Colonel Sheppard. It was one of the reasons they had wanted her. She barely had to look at things around here before they did stuff. It had seemed bloody marvellous at the start, but it seemed more like a right royal pain in the posterior. The problem was, she didn't know how she did it. And she hadn't even been _in_ the jumper, she'd just been watching Zelenka manipulate the crystal interface, and letting her mind wander absently through pleasant pastures, and then ―

'_Do prdele!'_

Puddlejumper off-line and nobody even vaguely sure how to get it going again. 'A fascinating challenge' someone had said to her with a wry grin. Sure. Just how McKay would view it. Not.

It wasn't a wonder that the officers in the mess hall had grinned at her. Meaghan wondered if she oughtn't have have placed a bet against herself earlier: she might have made a small fortune. Perhaps even enough to cover the ticket back from the States to Australia.

Because when Doctor McKay returned from his off-world trip with the Colonel, he was going to use her in an experiment to see just how long it takes one slightly overweight redhead to drop from the control tower to the ocean floor.

No doubt about it.

Being Meaghan was a painful experience.


End file.
